Former Sprint CSR Tells All

By cwaltersMarch 31, 2008

A man who worked on the front line of Sprint’s customer service department sent us some dirt on what goes on over there, including officially designated fake supervisors, obnoxious personal notes left in your account from your last call, and credit quotas of about $2.50 per call. “I was once punished by a Supervisor and written up because I was giving too many courtesy credits. Apparently Sprint doesn’t feel that being transferred 7 times and then hung up on is worth $10 in return.”

I’m a former Sprint CSR (left in February this year) and I thought I’d shed some light on how things work in that company. Feel free to post this, but I’d appreciate it if you did not use my name.

Agents are trained NOT to escalate calls – Ever been frustrated when you repeatedly ask for a Supervisor but do not get one? Call center agents at Sprint are trained to try and de-escalate calls and only get a Supervisor for you if absolutely necessary. Some agents will do this to the extreme and either transfer you away or disconnect your call rather than actually get a supervisor for you. Also, the chances of being directly transferred to a supervisor are slim, you almost always have to go through an agent first.

Also, if you do get speaking to a “Supervisor” you may not be speaking to a supervisor at all but rather a team lead, a senior agent who is not a supervisor but does take escalated calls and is authorized to identify him or herself as a supervisor when doing so.

Agents can be punished for giving credits – We are expected to give credits at a rate of no more than around $2.50/call. That means if I take 50 calls I’m expected to give no more than $125 in credits TOTAL. I’ve seen instances where over $400 in credits were required ON A SINGLE CALL. If our adjustment rate is too high, we are first blocked from being allowed to do ANY credits or straight out fired if there is a pattern of us being too generous.

As a result of these controls, you might notice that a call you’re on will magically be transferred or disconnected if a large credit is involved. Anything over $200 will likely have to be called in about multiple times.

Also we are prohibited from giving out courtesy credits for ANYTHING. The most we can give is 100 bonus minutes. Yep, that’s it. I was once punished by a Supervisor and written up because I was giving too many courtesy credits. Apparently Sprint doesn’t feel that being transferred 7 times and then hung up on is worth $10 in return.

We can’t give you any deals on phones – Standard Sprint Care reps are prohibited from offering any extra discounts on phones or free phones when you are not eligible for upgrade. We can be severely punished or fired if we give unauthorized discounts or credits on phones.

If you want a deal on a phone, call up and threaten to cancel. You’ll get to our account services department. They have more power than any other department to make deals for phones.

As long as our coverage maps show you have coverage, you have coverage – Even if you drop calls constantly and can barely get a signal in your own home, good luck trying to escape an Early Termination Fee due to this. If the coverage maps show you have coverage, that’s good enough for Sprint, regardless of what the actual situation is.

A while back a customer called in with the situation above (virtually no coverage) and asked the supervisor if he could waive the ETF. The supervisor asked if the man had coverage according to our maps. Agent said he did. Supervisor’s reply “he’s out of luck then, he has to pay the fee.”

If it’s not in the notes, it didn’t happen – VERY few calls are actually recorded, and of those that are, reps don’t have access to them. Only supervisors do. The calls are organized by length of call and the ID number of the agent who took the call, not by the phone number it was regarding or the account number accessed.

The only thing agents have to go on are the typed notes in the system. Even if the notes are blatant lies. For example, a rep can give you a credit that results in a contract extension without you knowing. Then he notes in the account “customer agreed to extend contract”, you call in to dispute said extension, having never agreed to it and unfortunately you are screwed since the notes say you did agree to it and even Supervisors are required to follow what they say.

You can also get screwed if there are no notes (something VERY common). Let’s say you get offered anything outside the ordinary (i.e. free internet on your phone for a year), but it doesn’t show on your next bill. If you call and say you were supposed to get it for free but there are no notes, do not expect Care to honor what you were promised. As far as they are concerned, you were promised nothing because nothing is in the notes. If you want to know what’s contained in your account notes, good luck. Reps may relay certain details of certain notes on the call. Sprint considers this confidential information and will not release them unless required to under a subpoena.

Also the reps may be saying nasty things about you, I’ve seen the following opinionated notes:

“BEWARE! This customer is racist!”“Customer is pathetic.”“Customer is very rude, kept cussing me out and didn’t give me a chance to talk.”“Customer is a credit junkie! He just keeps calling up for more and more.”

Officially agents are not supposed to put these kinds of notes in accounts, but it happens all the time.

Most agents don’t care much about their jobs – At the center I worked at, the only qualifications you needed for employment were a high school diploma and the ability to speak decent English. Call center agents are frequently under trained, under paid and over worked. The reason you get transferred, treated rudely and disconnected so many times is that there are simply a lot of agents who don’t give a crap about the customers AND keep their jobs simply because they are willing to sit at a desk and take calls for 8 hours a day.

Another reason is the turnover is so high there’s a large percentage of lesser trained agents working the phones.

It’s not always easy to get transferred back – We can’t give out the number for our tech support department (as well as certain other departments) so if you get transferred there and your call drops, you have to call back to be transferred again. HOWEVER, we can’t just simply transfer you back. We must verify your account again, find out what the issue is and determine that it is something that we can transfer you back there for.

It seems unbelievably stupid, but I once got a FAIL on a quality assurance review because a customer asked to be transferred to a certain department and I transferred him, without taking any of the steps mentioned above.

Agents can get away with hanging up on customers – Officially, hanging up on a customer is a fireable offense, however it’s shockingly easy to get away with if you know what you are doing and many agents do it frequently and never get caught. I admit I did it too on several occasions (for example when I was already 20 minutes late leaving and the customer was driving me crazy). At my center there were agents terminated for swearing at a customer, but I don’t know of anyone who was ever fired for hanging up on one.

Quality Assurance is NOT the customers friend – QA is not a tool to ensure agents are providing good customer se
rvice so much as a mechanism to ensure employees are following policy. Let’s say you were promised a $50 credit but it wasn’t noted and you never got it so you called back in to make sure it was done. I refuse to do it because it’s not noted and you can’t prove you were offered it. Even if that call gets escalated to a Supervisor, I can still get a perfect QA score on it because I followed policy. Conversely, I can FAIL that same call if I just give you the credit when according to policy you are not deserving of it.

Final NoteThe items above are based on my experiences as a CSR and do not always ring true. There are agents who will never hang up on customers and do care about their jobs, there are reasonable Supervisors who will sometimes go against the notes and we are sometimes permitted to offer extra discounts and specials, but these instances only happen I would say on a 1:5 ratio where the 5 represents the number of customers who get trapped by the issue.

The takeaway: if your experience with customer service isn’t quite what you’d expect, you can thank Official Corporate Policy. Combined with our insider’s view of outsourced quality assurance from a couple of weeks ago, a grim picture is emerging of “customer service” that exists in name only, and that’s driven by a faceless, top-down set of policies designed to ensure that nobody involved with the transaction ends up happy.

This is true, and very well written up. It’s been a while, and I think, if anything, the giving credit rules have become even more stringent since I worked Sprint customer service.

Though the center I worked at wanted people to be able to type twenty-five or so words per minute (they never stopped anyone that couldn’t anyway), and somewhat decent English wasn’t actually required.

After being verbally abused by an agent (not just once) from the Executive Customer Service Line. I cant say good things. But I will say that an EECB did the trick with Sprint. After a couple of days of figuring out with an Escalations Agent, what was going on. I ended up on the winning end of the Sprint stick (if thats even possible). The above from th OP is AMAZINGLY true though.

I have many friends who have been caught in new service contracts and NEVER agreed to them. They simply called to activate a new phone they had purchased. So I guess the bottom line is-beware to all Sprint customers.

This CSR is totally correct when he/she states that Quality Assurance is NOT for quality assurance but rather to ensure that agents are following policy.

I work in a call center for tech support. Agents that go “above & beyond” and actually want to help the customer are regularly scored lower by QA then agents that just blindly follow what their told to do.

funny, i havent had any of these issues since signing a new contract with Sprint in February… and I have contacted customer service 4 times so far: once for a questionable charge to my account (resolved/explained on first call), once during the online ordering process, once to have a credit added that was due to me, and once concerning adding a data line. every time, each service agent was knowledgeable, courteous, empathetic, and resolved my issues the first time around.

even the $25 dollar credit i was supposed to receive was applied instantly upon showing documented proof of being offered the credit.

i’m about to call them in a week as my billing still doesnt show a $50 credit i am due from a coupon i used during the online ordering process… i even have screen shots of the order plus an e-mail detailing my purchase with the coupon code reflected.

i was told it would show up within 1 or 2 billing cycles, and since i just paid for my second month (Sprint bills one month in advance), it has now exceeded the “second billing cycle” and still hasnt showed.

but since i am well documented, i expect there to be no issues as i am not asking for something undeserved… simply following up with something i was owed, with proper documentation.

too many wireless customers seem to think they are entitled to compensation for simply using the service they agreed to. wrong. they need to document whatever benefits they are offered so if there is a problem, they can back it up with something other than “bitching and whining”.

@renilyn: and in closing, i have NEVER, EVER been verbally abused by any CSR from any service provider, EVER.

maybe you caught someone on a really bad day… or maybe you arent being wholly forthcoming with your recall of the account.

they arent entitled ever to be verbally abusive to a customer, nor are you entitled to be abusive to them either.

and if you have an issue that could/should have been dealt with at a lower level of support, what makes you think you’re entitled to go straight to the top? in that case, i can see why a lot of people may be getting “verbally abused” by executive customer support… they’re there to help when all other avenues to seek resolution have failed for a legitimate concern or issue.

too many people on here seem to think they’re entitled to just “go straight to the top” and jump the chain of command. i wish people would mature enough so that a beneficial resource such as the Sprint Consumerist Hotline/Executive Customer Support doesnt get overabused and eventually closed… or worse, redirected to first line support due to misuse.

@oakie: So you’ve been very lucky all of four times that you’ve called. Just because you’ve gotten good service doesn’t change how corporate policy is dictated. Not every customer care rep is bad, after all, but they’re in a bad environment to actually solve customer problems well.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I’m convinced that this “model” for running customer service is out of some flunky and crappy business school where the ideas of extracting every dime while providing no more service than is necessary are the rules.

I really believe that in some cases if the ceos and vice presidents knew of the low-level sycophantic crap-business school morons they were hiring to run these operations, they’d change their tune.

It is these irresponsible idiots that freighten me in this country. They are the ones coming out of school with the hopes of extracting their dime from the system – not with the goal of producing something or improving anything. They may not drive the economy, but below the ship they control the rudder.

@oakie: no i don’t think that accomodation will ever be lost. it’s the executive help hotline. i don’t think executives will ever want to call the standard number that we do. i’ve had this number for all of 8 years. so before you go blaming everyone for everything that has not happened yet, chill out. besides it has been plastered all over the consumerist many of times so how do you point you finger at me as the one who is “going to ruin it for everybody”? troll much with you double posts?

I have found that treating people with respect a courtesy will get a fair result almost everytime. If your results are not satisfactory, don’t be a lemming, speak with your wallet. It’s the American way.

“Also, if you do get speaking to a “Supervisor” you may not be speaking to a supervisor at all but rather a team lead, a senior agent who is not a supervisor but does take escalated calls and is authorized to identify him or herself as a supervisor when doing so.”

This is almost always the case. An actual supervisor usually handles HR issues, passes mandates down from upper management, etc… they really aren’t set up to assist upset customers.

In most call centers the “supervisors” you get escalated to are senior reps with more experience problem solving and deescelating upset people.

@ConRoo: I struggle with walking that fine line between pride (i.e. speaking with my wallet) and practicality. I was with my previous cell carrier for about 5 years and experienced one too many cases of poor customer support (in my opinion of course.) I had had it, so I went to a competitor and ate a $1000 ETF, because it was multiple lines of service.

Though I probably made up the ETF over about 18 months of lower fees with my new providers, the $1000 in the upfront really hurt. But I couldn’t handle the thought of paying this provider, who so obviously (again, in my opinion) didn’t appreciate my business, that it was worth the money to me.

So, I voted with my wallet and it cost me $1000… but I gained a carrier whom I do feel truly appreciates my business, and the satisfaction of not giving this other company another dime. So I win?

My husband and I have Sprint. I have 2 lines and he has 1. He upgraded at Best Buy, and they didn’t added unlimited data on his account. A month later, over 200 dollars worth of charges. The CSR credited the whole amount. In December, Sprint rejected a mail in rebate for the same upgrade. The rebate department rushed the check to us in 3-5 business days. Both times Sprint handled the issue in the same call. We have had Sprint for 5 years now and no problems. Recently I’ve noticed Sprint has picked up the ball, give them some credit.

My son and I have both switched from Sprint to Verizon for some of the reasons in this article. Our main complaint wasn’t just that the CSRs could not explain the charges on a couple of bills any more than we could, but the final straw was the absolute, total lazyiness of the local Sprint store people. What a bunch of useless employees. They absolutely refuse to do anything other than refer you to Sprint’s telephone customer service. However, they will bend over backwards to sell you Sprint service/phones. And, they seem to have time to play games on their phones. What a joke of a company.

Coming from an advanced tech support rep that works for Alltel (used to work for a regional carrier but we were bought out), how many people here experience this from Alltel’s CS?

I’ve heard horror stories but haven’t had the pleasure of calling in myself.

I’d send in a “tell-all” list myself but ATS is pretty common sense. Turn your phone/device off/on before you call. Don’t expect us to troubleshoot issues with your personal computer if our devices are working fine. That’s about it.

That’s Sprint for you. I left them after 8 years of being treated like crap. They lied to me concerning their coverage maps repeatedly, until I got someone from Tech support to back my claim that we had no service where we lived. Then they said, “I was on the border” and I wouldn’t be charged a cancellation fee. Not until I had them dead pinned against the wall from their own people did they believe me after repeatedly asking them to check out the towers in my area. They wouldn’t return my call AFTER checking out the towers. It turns out the tower was down and they were in the process of building a new one. Something they could of told me all along. But they argued with me until their own people said otherwise. Have they updated their maps? No they have not.

@oakie: I have had Sprint CSR on two occasions not give me their ID number so I could document the call. They said it was against Sprint policy. So consider yourself lucky to be able to document any issues you have had with them. I agree with the original post. It’s probably about a 1:5 ratio. Mean 5 crappy CSR’s for every 1 good one.

@overbysara: That couldn’t be more true. Like I said before, I used to do CS at a much smaller, regional cell phone company. We were known as having the highest customer satisfaction in the tri-state area where we were located. We were bought out buy the big corp. who came in telling us that we were doing everything right and that practically nothing would change.

In come the call standards (calls per hour, transfer rate, call time, hold time, etc…), the stat tracking (sales (we are tech support, don’t know why they are pushing sales on us), etc.)

Talking to customers who have been with us since the regional days really puts into perspective the goal of larger cell phone companies. Money.

Right now being an employee for Sprint/Nextel I can honestly tell you guys that there has been major changes in the past month. Since the new CEO has taken over the emphasis has been on quailty customer care. I am currently the manager of my store and I was trained to basically be as rude to the customer as I want and I could always make up some BS if they contacted corporate. Now the times they are a changin’ now if they contact corporate on our store we get an “investigation” team to question the situation and see exactly what happened. I can’t vouch for the CSR’s but I will say this we have what is called POP otherwise known as Port Out Prevention which when you come into my store with a problem I can submit that problem to them and they will investigate the situation. These POP requests used to take 48-72 hours well each of the POP requests I have entered have been resolved in an hour. This is almost unheard of yet the major emphasis in all our conference calls and all of our meetings has been “improving the customer experience” because everyone in the market knows our rep is currently terrible at the moment.

@youbastid: and then no one will never get the new number will they. you know i was cool before, but now i’m just going to call it 5 times a day 5 days a week, just to get it shut down. yeah i have that kind of power. seriously you people can’t wait for the first chance you get to jump on me. i was trying to be helpful, and somehow, i’m the dick that ruined it for everybody, even though the number still works. but i’m the guy that spread some sort of secret number, and it’s my fualt, despite the fact that i pulled up from this website, without entering a secret password. seriously, my first comment was a genuine addition to the topic. why don’t you and oakie, add something useful instead of attack me or any other commenters on here.

@nikalseyn: Wait until you need customer service at Verizon, and you have to talk to their computerized menu system, the one that makes only the feeblest attempt at passing a Turing test. Next time I have to talk to one of those, I’m going to speak gibberish, and I hope I crash the damn thing. I would rather talk to the stupidest CSR in the pool than to a damn machine.

@nikalseyn: Maybe it’s because they don’t have any access to billing? I know reps in stores can give tech support/sales, but they cannot access billing or give any rebates/credits. (However, this is Canadian companies, so maybe policies are different).

@SuffolkHouse: “I really believe that in some cases if the ceos and vice presidents knew of the low-level sycophantic crap-business school morons they were hiring to run these operations, they’d change their tune.”

They DO know. I was a front-line third-party CSR for Nextel, then Sprint, for several years. (Disclaimer: My site got shut down recently, though I left a year ago.) My site had repeated personal visits from the Customer Service VP, especially around the time of the merger (when we went from customer-lukewarm to customer-friendly to customer-unfriendly to disconnected-from-reality). He presented all of the wonderful changes as entirely his initiative.

Having worked in the front-line care field with two other companies since, I believe that most major telecom providers suffer from some level of this sort of thinking, though Sprint is by far the worst offender I’ve seen. The worst part is that the entire environment seems custom-designed to sap morale, meaning NOBODY cares to actually go the extra mile – no matter how enthusiastic they were in the beginning.

I am a consultant for the largest call center software company in the world, and I can testify to the fact that this CSR is telling the truth. The customer service industry is DIRTY. Outsourcers are held to contracts that stipulate what service level they have to achieve (80% of calls in 20 seconds, for example) so what they will do is queue dump. If your call isn’t answered in 20 seconds, you won’t make their service goal anyways, so they just dump your call to the end of the line. Sprint is a client of mine and they are one of the worst.

sprint is the worst company on the planet, ive had my phone hacked three times and each time it was a nighmare dealing with these incompetent twits. I tell everyone I know to avoid them like the plague

There are a few companies I would say are absolutely incorrigible when it comes to customer service and Sprint is one of them. They have never had good customer service and it never appears to be a priority to their executives.

Funny. I guess there are very terrible practices out there… Sad that this sort of stuff happens.

However, to show the flip side… I work for a domestic software company that handles all its tech support and customer service calls in-house, and our Analysts are highly trained and picked for their customer service skills (and troubleshooting ability) more than anything else. You’ve gotta have at least a college degree (or incredible work experience) to even get in the door, and many of our people have been on the “front line” for over a year, and they’re still handling customer calls.

Of course, we do offer a premium product and are expected to back it up by our customers… but I guess not all companies are like ours.

It sucks, but even used car dealerships are coming to realize that the way to keep a customer and get more new ones is through awesome customer service. Maybe the big corporations will figure it out too.

My first employer out of college had a deal with them, so, being a poor post-grad, I signed up. At the time, I lived in Chicago. I never got bars. Never. Right in the middle of the third largest city in the country. So, I went to a store, thinking there was something wrong with my phone. Turns out the phone was fine and no one in the store could figure out why I didn’t get a signal. I called a CSR from my apartment, explaining my problem. Her response was, “Well, can you step away from the tall buildings?”

I reminded her I lived in Chicago. She laughed, transferred me to a supervisor when I asked to be, and I was mysteriously disconnected. I had my employer eat the contract cancellation fees.

I’m another former sprint rep (left in January this year) and I wanted to mention their official policy is to disconnect a call INSTEAD of allowing you to record it.

If you say you are going to record it, agents are directed to NOT consent to being recorded and disconnect. However, this only applies to states which require the caller to inform the other party they will be recording, in states where this is not needed, customers are free to record calls.

I’m sorry to say though even playing a call recording of your own to try and prove a case won’t get you anywhere, Sprint will just claim that you and a buddy made the recording to try to scam them out of something.

At my particular center, Supervisors did actually take calls sometimes, but it was usually the team leads taking escalations.

I just reported them to the Better Business Bureau – within 2 weeks I got a call from someone at Sprint that deals with all the complaints. Within 5 minutes I received an instant $150 dollar credit… and was offered a new phone for free.

The 15 minutes it takes to fill out the form is well worth the absence of an idiot on the other end of the line who will lie and do nothing for you.

@RandomZero: i disagree. i work for a Sprint Business Solutions Partner and am on the phone with CSR’s all day long. there are so many instances of them going above and beyond what’s expected. i gotta admit…i have been disconnected quite a few times myself, but there’s always a bad apple. call back and get a diff CSR.

@sirwalter1967: what kind of dumb-witted sh*t are you doing that your phone is getting hacked?

I worked for sprint and I am so happy that someone actually made it clear what was going on. I hated working for them, and I would try everything to get around the rules, we always used to say. “I sometimes wonder how sprint has any customers”

This article is truthful. There are more problems with Sprint’s customer service and management. They still treat customer’s badly. They treat their employees unfairly. They are an old-style company. Sprint is unfair to employees. They promote EEOC guidelines and are unfair to other groups of people. Customers are treated badly and so are the employees.

As a longtime Sprint customer, and a tech support specialist at another very hated company, this is very true, just keep calling…I called the Sprint consumerist Esecutive cust srvc hotline, no help. But, suprisingly, an EECB worked for me. I need to work up the courage to quit my useless job too. QA SUCKS!!!!!!!

All I want to say is that online chat with Sprint CSR has proven invaluable to me more than a few times. You get all the documentation of the conversation e mailed to you in the form of a web transcript ver batim. I NEVER call in. It’s a joke.